Pregnancy and Biofeedback

Learning how to control your biological response to pain and stress can help keep them at bay.

What Biofeedback Is

A technique that teaches you how to control body processes that are usually not under your control.

Huh? It's actually pretty simple. Generally, biofeedback works by feeding you information about some unconscious physiological function (like your heartbeat, blood pressure, or body temperature) as a therapist guides you through various relaxation techniques. Your therapist acts as a coach, helping you to recognize your body's signals and use these techniques to help change your body's reaction. For example, if you were suffering from lower back pain, your therapist would apply sensors to your body that provide feedback on factors such as muscle tension, brain-wave activity, respiration, heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature. As the practitioner monitors the feedback these sensors provide, he or she uses relaxation techniques to calm you, reducing muscle tension and easing your pain. Over time, you learn which techniques work to alter the function you want to change. Ultimately, you should be able to control the function all by yourself through simple relaxation, without needing the visual feedback that the biofeedback machine provides.

What It Does

During pregnancy, biofeedback can help you stave off the headaches that plague so many women, especially during the first trimester. It can also be a safe and effective partner to Kegel exercises in preventing urinary incontinence, which is pretty troublesome during pregnancy when there's a baby dancing on your bladder. Other pregnancy symptoms that may be alleviated by biofeedback include insomnia, morning sickness, depression, anxiety, and stress.

And while there are no guarantees that relaxation and stress reduction alone will keep you from developing preeclampsia and other blood-pressure disorders, research shows that biofeedback is a safe and effective way to at least attempt to keep blood pressure down and stop these conditions in their tracks.

What You Need to Know About Biofeedback During Pregnancy

Biofeedback is not a cure-all. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to be able to relax certain chronic physiological conditions away. For instance, while biofeedback is a great way to help keep your blood pressure and stress levels as low as possible if you've been diagnosed with preeclampsia, your practitioner may recommend bed rest or another treatment. And in most cases, biofeedback alone isn't going to be able to lower your blood-sugar levels if you've been diagnosed with gestational diabetes or stop hemorrhaging that's the result of some physiological problem with your baby's placenta. With that said, biofeedback is a pretty powerful tool to have in your arsenal when it comes to alleviating many not-so-serious pregnancy woes.

From the What to Expect editorial team and Heidi Murkoff, author of What to Expect When You're Expecting. Health information on this site is based on peer-reviewed medical journals and highly respected health organizations and institutions including ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists), CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics), as well as the What to Expect books by Heidi Murkoff.

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What to Expect When You're Expecting, 5th edition, Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel.